Sonoport Sound Providers Series - Introducing the pioneers in online delivery of interactive sounds: interview with SoundRangers
This week we interviewed Barry Dowsett, the co-founder of Soundrangers.
Barry Dowsett is a professional composer and sound designer working in the video games industry. He has created original audio content for an array of cool projects, ranging from small to large, AAA to mobile, for developers and publishers such as Activision, Popcap, Electronic Arts, THQ/Dreamworks, F9, Signal Mobile, Eidos, Gree, Playdom, Griptonite, Microsoft Game Studios, iWin, Disney Interactive, Google and many more.Â
In 1998 he co-founded Soundrangers, an original pioneer in the online delivery of production music and sound effects and the first to deliver content optimized for game and interactive development. In addition to the custom design work, he actively creates and license content from this platform to interactive developers looking for high quality audio assets.
1) Thanks for taking the time to do this interview. Soundrangers has been around for quite some time now, for over 18 years! I think Soundrangers is probably the godfather of all the other online sound libraries available today.
You mentioned in a previous interview that this started because you were spending a huge amount of time manipulating sounds that was originally recorded for traditional media (film, TV) in order to use them in interactive projects, a field that was still new at that time. Now that interactive media is absolutely bursting everywhere, how you feel about the evolution of the whole industry?
Sure, and thanks for being a long time follower- it’s been a while now! Regarding the emergence of the interactive media field, I think it’s great. With the evolution of streaming technologies combined with bandwidth and memory constraints being freed from what they used to be, we’re seeing a higher quality of audio content surviving the integration process into interactive media.  This includes mobile and console games, online media and other areas of the interactive neighborhood. Because of this, we get to work with larger memory budgets which inevitably improves the quality of sound and allows more complexity and variation in the overall soundscape. Library wise, when we launched Soundrangers in 1998, we had to build everything proprietarily from scratch, including the website, the ecommerce system, the demo players- everything.  These days you can get a lot of this stuff out of the box which makes it much easier to evolve our systems since there’s so much concentration on cloud based content and the tech to support it these days.
2) You guys were the pioneers of several features that are common today in the online delivery of audio content, such as the individual auditioning of audio files through an interface and downloads with selectable file format, sample and bit rate. Since then you’ve continued to introduce innovative new features such as Soundboxes which I think is really awesomely convenient. As you continue to strive to improve user experience, what are the new features in development that you guys are currently working on or looking at implementing?
Currently, we’re improving the pipeline by which high volume film, TV and interactive users can access our library under a blanket license. This primarily affects our music library, giving end users more options than just a straight sync license. We’re also working on a set of protocols that will allow us to push our internal library over to 3rd party systems. And of course, and most importantly, we’re always improving the value and usability of our audio content.
3) Could you tell us what are the trends in this field that you are currently observing? Is there anything exciting that you are looking forward to in sound?Â
VR at the moment seems to be the next and hottest thing. We’re looking forward to some consolidation in tech and best practices in terms of where the development of sound is going in this area. I’ve seen some amazing visual demos, but audio-wise it’s pretty far behind.  Once we start seeing higher quality audio content arrive, combined with the visual, you might not ever return from your VR experience.
4) Throughout your years as professional sound designers and recordists, what’s your favourite sound individually and what’s the most downloaded sound by users on your website?
Don’t really have any favorites, because there are so many moments in time where you realize what you’re recording won’t ever happen the same way again, making each session special. But I can tell you the most amazing sounds generally come from the most unexpected moments.  Very similar to the music creation process.  I personally am most interested in the character of the sound- you can talk all day about gear and sample rate, but in the end none of it matters if there’s no essence to what you’re recording. So I always listen to the character of the sound and often times just run into stuff traveling around. Part of the fun with this whole thing is getting to observe your surroundings in a way that mostly goes unnoticed through the eyes- especially when you’re on location recording… listening with your eyes closed.
5) Lastly, can you tell us what’s an ordinary day like at Soundrangers like?
Every day is different depending on what’s in my email inbox!  But generally, we schedule production runs where we’re developing new sounds or music tracks for our library and schedule this stuff out. Some of it requires more complexity than others based on location or special access.  In the case of music, there are players and studios to contend with. When we’re on custom design projects, the production pipeline is a set period of time depending on milestone requirements, which will drive our daily production duties.
We are currently featuring SoundRangers curated sounds for www.sonigram.io
Check our their sounds under the Featured category!














